Open letter to Nikon regarding movie mode, uncomressed RAW and RED

Here’s my open letter to Nikon pleading with them to develop a product
to fill one of the gaps left by Thursday’s RED announcements. Many
people were expecting RED to announce a camera to compete directly with
the Nikon D90 and Canon 5DmkII movie modes but that didn’t happen (all
the RED cameras with Nikon/Canon lens mounts are priced WAY WAY above a
Nikon D90 or 5DmkII). I’m under no illusion - I expect this letter will
be thrown in the bin but it’s worth a shot; eh?!?

To: Nikon-Europe

Subject: Proposals for Movie Mode in dSLRs

Dear Nikon,

I have been a long-time user of Nikon camera bodies and lenses. Needless
to say, I’m huge fan. I’m a filmmaker and - if I may be so bold - I’d
like to propose a few ideas about the movie mode for dSLR cameras. Like
many other filmmakers and photographers, I’m very excited by the
prospect of having a single camera which can shoot both stills and
movies. Such a camera would be revolutionary, especially given that so
many employers and clients want photographers to capture both movies and
stills on every job. The upcoming recession will put more pressure on
photographers to be able to deliver both video and stills as clients
attempt to cut costs even further whilst trying to satisfy an audience
hungry for rich media. The recession will also put pressure on
filmmakers to produce high-quality work on ever tightening budgets.

The D90’s movie mode was an excellent start but, as I’m sure you’re
aware, it has some serious limitations which makes it unsuitable for the
majority of filmmaking applications. Of course, I realise that the D90
wasn’t trying to be a “pro” movie camera but if Nikon were to release a
camera with a “professional” movie mode then it would almost certainly
sell incredibly well. The filmmaking community is primed and ready for
an affordable movie camera with a large sensor and a Nikon lens mount;
there is a huge amount of pent up demand built up by a combination of
the 35mm-lens-adapters and also by RED. Filmmakers are falling in love
with being able to use quality glass in their filmmaking but many are
not entirely satisfied by using 35mm-lens adapters and cannot afford a
camera like the RED ONE.

To cut to the chase, I’ll go ahead and list the features which would -
in my humble opinion - go a long way towards creating the ideal “pro”
movie mode on an digital SLR.. First, the essential features:

A DX or FX-sized sensor (ideally FX) with the excellent performance
for which Nikon is renowned (low noise, high sensitivity, wide
dynamic range, beautiful handling of highlights, generally
gorgeous images)

Full manual control during movie recording (shutter spead, ISO,
aperture and white ballance all need to be controlled independently
using dedicated hardware controls. Hunting through menu options to
set an essential parameter is too clunky)

A sensor which can continue recording indefinitely without
overheating

A suitably fast frame read-out time to reduce rolling shutter
effects to a minimum; the D90’s rolling shutter is probably one of
its biggest “deal breakers” as a viable movie mode.

A high quality recording scheme which uses a low enough bitrate to
be recorded to off-the-shelf storage cards but which is high enough
quality to be graded agressively in postproduction. Compressed RAW
recording would be excellent (CineformRAW would be a good choice
because it is field-proven and it already has a mature
post-production workflow but I’m not sure whether or not CineformRAW
is currently implemented on a chip). Adobe have grand plans for RAW
movie workflows in Premiere Pro and After Effects. Or, if compressed
RAW is impossible at this time then please record a lightly &
efficiently compressed (h.264 or AVC-intra?) 10- or 12-bit per
channel per pixel RGB or YUV (at least 4:2:2) file which captures as
much of the sensor’s dynamic range as possible (i.e. doesn’t clip or
crush anything). 10-bit logarithmic RGB may be the best option if
compressed RAW is not possible as 10-bit log is an efficient way to
capture a wide dynamic range and because 10-bit log is well
understood by the film postproduction community (10-bit log is
frequently used for high quality film scans and for digital cinema
cameras like the Panavision Genesis). To create low enough datarates
to allow off-the-shelf storage cards to be used, it would be nice if
the camera downsampled from the sensor’s full image (using some form
of pixel averaging so the beneficial effects of oversampling can be
realised; i.e. please do NOT using pixel binning!). I’m not sure if
downsampling of the RAW image to produce a smaller RAW file is
technically possible; if it is not then perhaps recording a
1920x1080 or 1024x720 frame size using AVC-Intra, H.264 or JPEG2000
using 10-bit log per channel would be better. If downsampling by a
non-integer factor is computationally too expensive then it may
better to record a non-standard frame size using pixel averaging
rather than to use pixel binning (e.g. if the native sensor
resolution is - say - 4000x3000 then it may be better to average
every block of 4 pixels to record something like 1000x750 rather
than to use pixel binning to achieve a standard frame size
like 1024x720)

Record to a medium which allows long record-times using
off-the-shelf media. Several options might be:

Record to dual-slot SD or CF cards(ideally set up in such a way
as to allow users to record continually by hot-swapping. i.e.
camera fills card 1 and then starts recording to card 2; user
swaps out card 1 with an empty card; when camera has filled card
2 it starts writing to the empty card in slot 1 etc ad infinitum
without stopping the recording).

a USB-master function to allow the camera to record to
off-the-shelf USB disks

a built-in controller and enclosure to allow the use of 2.5” or
1.8” IDE hard drives (or perhaps this enclosure could be made
available as an add-on grip)

a way to attach the camera to a laptop to record directly to the
laptop’s hard disk (e.g. over USB or FireWire)

Features which are not essential but which would be very nice are:

24, 25 and 30fps frame rate options (even higher frame rates would
be lovely). If only 1 frame rate is possible then - as you know -
24p is the way to go because it can be converted to both 25fps (PAL)
and 30fps (NTSC) without too much trouble. If only 2 frame rates are
possible then perhaps 24p and 25p would be the best options because
24p can be quite elegantly converted to 30p whilst the conversion
from 24 to 25p requires either artefact-prone interpolation or
tedious time stretching of the audio.

Enable AutoFocus (and face recognition?) during movie mode (this is
by no means essential; many filmmakers are used to manual focussing
as long as the monitoring setup is good enough to judge focus.) AF
during movie mode would be an awesome option. Shooting one-man-band
documentary-style on an 85mm at f1.8 with an FX-sized sensor would
make incredible images but focussing would be a major issue. In many
cases, the camera can probably make better focusing decisions than
the operator; especially if the operator can tell the camera where
in the frame to focus (possibly using a touch-screen?) and if the
camera could then use object recognition and AF-servo technology to
follow the object as it moves through the frame.

An S/PDIF digital audio input so the camera can be used to record
high-quality audio (from a separate audio recorder like the
Edirol R-44) without having to go to the expense of designing and
building decent audio pre-amps and analogue-to-digital converters.

Line-level audio inputs to allow the camera to be used with audio
mixers

An HD-SDI output to allow the camera to be connected to HD video
monitors, tape decks and other I/O boxes.

The HDMI (and HD-SDI?) outputs need to be derived from the
full-sensor resolution using pixel averaging, not pixel-binning. It
would also be excellent if the outputs can also be set to
“clean” (i.e. without any menu options super-imposed)

A way to load look-up-tables into the camera to allow “looks” to be
defined and applied (non-destructively) to the image so the HD-SDI
output can be given a “look” even when viewing the monitor on set.

A “pre-record” mode where the camera is continuously recording a
rolling 5 second’s worth of footage and when the operator hits the
“record” button, the camera saves the previous 5 seconds and starts
recording continuously. This would be very useful for nature
documentary work, for example.

As you may be aware, Thursday 13th November saw the announcement of a
new line up of movie/stills cameras from RED. This announcement contains
some amazing cameras but I (and others) feel that they have missed a big
segment of the market; a segment which could possibly be filled by Nikon
and which could earn Nikon many, many more sales. In my humble opinion,
Nikon is uniquely placed to dominate the market for professional movie
cameras with DX or FX sized sensors priced at under £4000. Nikon has an
excellent reputation; Nikon doesn’t have an existing video-camera
portfolio to protect; many filmmakers (currently using 35mm-adapters)
are already building large arsenals of Nikon glass and, of course, Nikon
makes excellent cameras!

Please, please, PLEASE consider making a camera with a “pro” movie mode.
An affordable (less than £4000???) movie camera which records to a high
quality codec with full manual control using an FX-sized sensor, Nikon
glass and off-the-shelf recording media would send phenomenal shockwaves
throughout the industry and I’m sure would garner huge sales.

I try to mitigate climate change using computer science. I am a Research Engineer at DeepMind, mostly working on energy problems. Previously, I worked on energy disaggregation as a post-doc at Imperial College London. Read more about me…